The introduction of flexible website management technologies like the WordPress Content Management System (CMS) has effectively simplified web design and web development for non-technical users.
This is great news for individuals or businesses wanting an online presence that is easy to manage.
Before blogging and the introduction of powerful CMS technologies, if you needed to build a professional site for your business, you typically had to wait until both the web development and web design processes were fully completed. This could mean weeks, even sometimes many months of waiting for the work to be done!
The introduction of WordPress themes helped change all this. In this post, you will learn what WordPress themes are, how WP themes can help you and your business save money on web design costs, and how WP themes help you easily customize your site.
Web Site Design Evolution
More website owners are benefiting from an evolution in website design that has been going for a number of years now. If you are a business owner, you will want to know about this, because it could save you thousands of dollars on web development or website design costs.
Let’s briefly review what used to happen before WordPress came along:
First, you would meet with a website developer or web site designer for a brief. After that, the actual “web design” itself would be decided upon. This involved spending time with a professional web designer discussing elements of your website like the layout, colors, styles, visual elements, content, etc.
Every page of your web site then had to be individually created with all of your design elements and scripts coded into your content. All the pages were then assembled into a website using hyperlinks and custom coded navigation menus and uploaded to your server, together with every other file required to make your website work – script libraries, images, media, etc.
(image source:adobe.com)
Only once everything had been tested and functioned how it was supposed to (and looking the way the client had wanted it to look), was the website deemed to have been completed and ready to go live.
The next step in the evolution of business web design was the introduction of “web templates”. A website template allows the ”look and feel” of the website to be worked on separately from the page content. Having ready-made templates helped to speed up the process of developing websites and resulted in lowered costs of production. This also enabled web site development companies to work with smaller business clients with smaller budgets …
(image source: www.dreamweaver-templates.org)
As more businesses started using “template-based” websites, templates were developed that could offer a range of customization features, like colour palettes, the ability to pick different content styles, formats, header, footer and navigation elements, layouts, and so on.
As web sites and website editing tools developed, web templates also started transforming into web template ”systems”, letting website owners customize the visual components of their web site.
Then, WordPress came along and helped to kick off a new digital publishing revolution …
(WordPress – A Content Publishing Revolution)
To learn more about content management systems and the benefits of the WordPress CMS, see the tutorial below:
About WordPress Themes
A WordPress theme takes the idea of a web template system much further.
The WP theme system controls the design areas of a website. It lets you add a “skin” over your site similarly to what a web template system does but also gives you complete control over the management, presentation and ability to customize template settings.
As WordPress describes in its web site …
A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A Theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Themes may include customized template files, image files (*.jpg, *.gif), style sheets (*.css), custom Pages, as well as any necessary code files (*.php).
(source: WordPress.org)
As the above quote states, a unique and revolutionary feature of WordPress is that how your site appears to site visitors on the outside is a completely different thing from how your website is configured internally to handle areas like content management and functionality.
Basically, what this means is that WP themes let you modify the appearance of your site as often as you like without modifying your website’s content and all the work you’ve put into it. For example, if WP site has been configured for e-commerce, changing the entire look of the site with a different theme won’t affect the content or the functionality of the site. All e-commerce features, plugin settings and product information will remain intact, but the site will look completely different.
This is huge! Why?
Because when your site is built using WordPress, you no longer have to spend weeks or months waiting for your site to be completed. You can get your website built quickly and start with any WP theme you want, and then completely edit the look, feel and design of your website in mere minutes, whenever you want … and as many times as you like!
Even better, you can easily replace any theme on your WP site with no website code programming knowledge required. Simply choose any theme you like, install it on your website and activate it. WordPress allows you to change your entire site’s web design and customize elements like header images, layout, styling options and more in minutes …
As WordPress is distributed as open source software, professional website designers can create themes specifically for the WordPress CMS platform using the WP templating system.
This means that loads of great WordPress themes are made available to WP users. WP are usually distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, or they can be purchased as Premium (paid) themes.
The WordPress team maintains a FREE theme directory which gives WordPress users access thousands of excellent WP themes at no cost …
(WordPress.org – Themes Directory)
As WordPress becomes more popular, more designers are now focusing on creating themes for a wider range of applications.
WP themes range from functional-looking, to elegant designs that are breathtaking and could easily cost hundreds to thousands of dollars to develop. Surprisingly, most themes can be bought very cheaply, especially when compared to what you would have had to pay if a website designer had to develop it from scratch.
You can see several theme galleries that include various examples of great WP themes in this post:
(Browse Thousands Of FREE WordPress Themes!)
Benefits And Advantages Of Themes
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of choosing WordPress themes over using applications that require traditional web design:
Easy & Quick To Install
Themes are very easy to install on your site. Simply upload a zip folder that contains the plugin files to your Plugins folder via your dashboard and activate. Even easier still, you can install any of the themes listed in the WP themes directory at WordPress.org) directly from within your WordPress dashboard.
Additionally,
- WordPress has a large community of commercial web developers who contribute thousands of great WordPress Themes available to WordPress users. And many of these themes are completely free to use!
- Themes give sites a unified and consistent design across all the site’s elements, like pages, headers, footers, menus, layout, etc …
- A “theme” works independently of your digital content. This makes it possible to replace the “look and feel” of your website as often as you want without deleting the site’s content.
- Many WordPress themes provide built-in features and settings that enable you to easily customize the site’s style, layout and design elements to create a unique look to suit your preferences.
- Many WP themes are built using a framework that allows users to update the theme to newer theme versions without losing any customizations (e.g. styles)
- WordPress allows you to search, import, install and update WordPress Themes automatically inside the site’s administration interface.
- Themes allow WP users to save thousands of dollars on web development costs. Free WordPress themes cost nothing and most “Premium”themes are typically very inexpensive.
Responsive WordPress Themes
Many theme designers are now creating “responsive” themes.
A responsive theme allows a website to automatically readjust the web layout to display smoothly over different monitor sizes and screen resolutions, as well as across different platforms) …
A responsive theme is also optimized for each platform. Users can navigate, read and load the site on all device browsers without having to resize anything, or requiring website owners to install additional browser elements.
Note: When purchasing WordPress themes, we recommend choosing a responsive WordPress theme. Not only will the theme ensure that the content and layout of your site will work correctly on your visitors’ devices, but it also means that the theme is newer than non-responsive themes and therefore probably complies with the latest standards of web design and web coding.
Hopefully, the above overview has helped you gain a clearer understanding about themes, what WordPress themes are, how WP themes help your business save money, and how WordPress themes make customizing your web design easy.
To learn where to find the best themes for your blog, visit this page: How To Find The Best Free And Paid WordPress Themes For Your WordPress Website Or Blog.
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